The hour of departure found Miss Gerard at the wharf with Captain McDowell at her side. When they reached the plank leading to the steamer's deck the provost-marshal's authoritative voice to the officers detailed there with crossed swords was a sufficient open sesame to enable Helen to walk quietly on board. After they were in the cabin the gallant captain lingered at her side until he obtained from her a promise to correspond with him. Strange inconsistency! one may say of our fair girl, but not singular in a woman, that after such fidelity to the cause of the South, and bound by such an inflexible vow to her brother, which she never verbally broke, she was at that very hour actually touched by a tenderness for one who was doing all in his power to overthrow the Confederacy, and had proved his earnestness on many a hard-fought field, especially at Raymond and Fort Gibson, where they had already trodden the same path without being aware of each other's existence. But this very inconsistency is, after all, the strongest proof that politics holds a secondary place in the heart of woman, and that love is always the first necessity of her being. Helen, after such various and hazardous adventures, found herself once more in her native city, New York. Many solicitous and finally tender letters passed between the captain and Miss Gerard, but when the formal proposal of marriage was made she placed the missive in her father's hands. "Daughter, is your heart in this?" he asked. "Yes," was her modest reply; and the next steamer carried a joint letter from father and daughter extending a cordial invitation to Captain McDowell to make them a visit. In the following autumn one of October's fairest days saw Helen the bride of the officer in blue coat and brass buttons. S.G.W. BENJAMIN. HEINRICH HEINE. Somewhat more than twenty years have elapsed since Heine's death. Had he lived to the present time he would have been little past the age of eighty, and there are many of his contemporaries and associates who are still alive. Though an exceptionally isolated figure in the world of letters, he serves to connect us in a great measure with the heroic age of German literature; and not in point of time only, but by the nature of his work, which exhibits certain elements of the Goethe-and-Schiller period, combined with others of the school of "Young Germany," so called. This, at least, is the position always assigned him; and the following pages may not be uninteresting in showing to some extent, and by means of a few of the more striking points of his character and genius, how far he really occupies this place in literature.